Issue 9

December 2001

Michael Glenn

 

I have been doing this thing since before I was born. I will do this still a hundred years from my death. Poetry is not an ink stain or a bunch of fonts slapped together. It's in the blood. I currently write from my home in a place called the American Southwest in a secret location having been exiled from the real world. My wife and my daughter keep me company and love me when I am at my worst. I hope someday to live in the real world again.

 

Familiar Faces

She’s the mother of two angels
She looks good in black.
Has a 200 $ a day crack habit
And sleeps with Benjamin Franklin.
Hangs out on the streets at night.
Can’t keep her ass out of jail.
Her mother told her there would be
Days like this, there’d be years like this.
Her medicaid card can get her valium.
Her welfare card can get her high.
Her S.S. card can get 50 bucks
If somebody is willing to be her.
Her hair smells like sweat and fear.
Her face looks like someone familiar
To at least one out of ten people.
It should though, she went to school
Around the corner with most of them.
There are needle scars and John scars
And crack pipe burns and dirty nails
And not all her clothes have holes.
Her two angels are upstate somewhere.
Living the good life with someone else.
She could be anybody’s daughter
But she’s mine,
And I drive on by.

 

A Good Hard Rain

I hope it’s raining on a barbecue somewhere
Or on a French terrace filled with cats
Or the last place I saw a good movie
I hope the rain is cold and hard on the rooftops
Where the rich are dancing
Where lovers are singing inside each other
Where the cat burglar is creeping
I want a freezing icy rain on the heads of
Dead men in suit and tie leading lies
Movie stars beyond human reach
The drunk squeezing his last drop out
The cop turning his eyes from his job
On anybody that ever hated me.

I want to taste the raindrops of last summer
Or the one before that
And the first summer I was alive.
I want the deep cleansing rain that Noah had
Right here inside my head.

I want acid rain to fall on everything and everyone
So they can smell the decay in it
The perversion of a once wonderful thing.
So they will feel like I do right now.
Rain on you wherever you are
Rain on a ’57 Chevy painted green
Rain inside the mind of the grand dragon
Rain on a mime in times square
Rain on Jim Morrison’s tomb
Rain on the dead
Rain on a herd of cows eating grass in Ohio
Rain on JD Salinger wherever he is

Rain all the time forever and never stop till
It all gets clean or washed away or drowned.

Then let the sun shine for a while
Just to say, ’Hey. It ain’t all bad’

Prometheus Martyred

They dragged Prometheus into the street
And quickly put two bullets in.
Dead is the bearer of destruction’s gift,
The father of cruel inventiveness.
‘He brought fire to a weak race!’
they shouted at his corpse.
An elderly couple who’d lost a son in ‘Nam,
Spit in his glazed-over eyes.
Drunks pissed all over with fervor.
A cheerleader lit him on fire,
And they let him burn from a light pole.
I shook my head and went back in,
For another shot and one more beer.

© Michael Glenn

 

Index